Top GCP cost management tools in 2024
The cloud offers unparalleled scalability and agility, but keeping your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) bill under control is a challenge. Here’s where having a GCP cost management tool comes in—your secret weapon for optimizing your cloud spend and maximizing value.
5 reasons why you should have a GCP cost management tool
Hidden costs: Cloud bills can be complex and contain hidden charges. Cloud Cost management tool help you identify these hidden costs, such as unused resources, under-utilised reserved instances, or inefficient configurations, that can significantly inflate your bill.
Right-sizing resources: It’s easy to over-provision resources in the cloud, leading to wasted spend. Cost management tools provide insights into resource utilization, helping you identify opportunities to right-size your resources and choose the most cost-effective options for your workloads.
Budget control: Cloud spending can easily spiral out of control without proper cost monitoring. Cost management tools offer features like budgeting and alerts, allowing you to set spending limits and receive notifications when you’re approaching or exceeding your budget.
Data-driven decisions: Cost management tools provide valuable data and insights into your cloud spending patterns. This data empowers you to make informed decisions about resource allocation, pricing models, and your overall cloud strategy. You can identify trends, optimize configurations, and choose the most cost-effective solutions for your specific needs.
Improved ROI: By optimizing your cloud spend, you can maximize the ROI from your GCP resources.
Top GCP cost management tools
1. ManageEngine CloudSpend
ManageEngine CloudSpend is a cloud cost management (CCM) tool that helps businesses manage their multi-cloud costs from a single dashboard.
Multi-cloud support: Manage and analyze your spending across leading cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and now, GCP. This unified view allows you to compare costs and identify optimization opportunities across your entire cloud infrastructure.
Cost visibility and granular insights: Gain comprehensive insights into your cloud spending with detailed reports and visualizations. Drill down into specific services, resources, and departments to pinpoint areas for cost reduction.
AI-powered recommendations: Leverage built-in machine learning to get intelligent recommendations for optimizing your cloud costs. CloudSpend analyzes your usage patterns and suggests right-sizing options, reserved instance purchases, and other cost-saving strategies.
Budgeting and alerts: Set spending limits and receive real-time alerts when you’re nearing or exceeding your budget. Budget policies in CloudSpend allow you to configure budgets and alerts to avoid bill shock.
Automated cost management: Automate repetitive tasks like resource tagging and schedule on/off policies to streamline your cost management efforts. This lets your teams focus on more strategic initiatives and not worry about the budget.
Cost allocation and chargeback: Chargeback is a method of bringing accountability within business units to encourage transparency and democratize resource usage within your organization.
2. GCP Cost Management – A native tool by Google
GCP offers scalability and agility for businesses. However, without proper cost management, that flexibility can quickly lead to unexpected bills. GCP Cost Management is a Google tool that empowers you to optimize your cloud spending and maximize the value of your GCP investment. The major drawback of GCP Cost Management is it’s lack of multi-cloud support.
Cost monitoring and reporting: Gain real-time cost visibility across projects, services, and resources. Drill down into specific areas to identify cost drivers and potential savings opportunities.
Committed use discounts: Significantly reduce costs by committing to upfront purchases of specific resources through Google’s committed use discounts program. GCP Cost Management helps you identify opportunities to take advantage of these discounts.
3. CloudHealth
CloudHealth, formerly a standalone company, has joined forces with VMware. This strategic union combines CloudHealth’s expertise in multi-cloud cost management with VMware’s cloud management solutions, creating a powerhouse for optimizing your cloud environment.
Multi-cloud visibility: CloudHealth helps you gain unified visibility and cost insights across your entire cloud infrastructure, including AWS, Azure, and GCP. No more siloed data—see the big picture and identify optimization opportunities across all your cloud deployments.
Showback and chargeback: Empower responsible resource utilization by allocating cloud costs to specific teams or departments. This transparency fosters accountability and encourages cost-conscious decision-making within your organization.
FinOps enablement: CloudHealth is a member of The FinOps Foundation and promotes a FinOps culture within your organization. FinOps is a practice where teams like finance, engineering, and business teams collaborate to ensure cloud costs are in check and aligning with business outcomes.
4. Harness CCM
Harness is a software company that provides a continuous delivery platform (CDP) designed to streamline and automate the software delivery life cycle for businesses. The platform focuses on automating deployments and infrastructure provisioning.
Cost anomaly detection: Harness CCM identifies unusual spending patterns that could indicate potential issues or opportunities for cost reduction. For example, the solution will alert you to a sudden spike in storage costs that might signify accidental data replication or an inefficient backup process.
Predictive cost forecasting: Leverage AI to forecast future cloud costs and proactively manage your budget. This allows you to anticipate potential overspending and make adjustments before the bill arrives. Predict your cloud spend for the next quarter based on historical data and current usage trends, allowing you to allocate resources efficiently.
5. Apptio Cloudability
Apptio Cloudability is a CCM platform designed to help organizations optimize their spending across various cloud providers.
Tagging: Categorize your cloud resources with relevant tags. Tag profiles allow for granular cost allocation and let you chargeback to business units to increase accountability.
Policy-driven optimization: Define cost optimization policies and automatically suggest resources for rightsizing based on those policies. For example, you can set a policy to downsize resources after a certain period of inactivity automatically, ensuring you don’t waste money on idle resources.
Managing cloud costs is a continuous process
Cost management for your cloud resources is an ongoing journey. By leveraging the right tools, fostering a culture of cost awareness, and continuously optimizing your GCP environment, you can keep your cloud costs under control and ensure your cloud investment delivers maximum value. Explore ManageEngine CloudSpend’s pricing tier to help you evaluate the cost-benefit analysis of this powerful tool.
